Myna v2.0.0 Beta is released. It features more bold and (faux) italic variants and even supports APL characters. Please download it and report issues for v2.0.0 full release.
Do you ever feel like your font treats symbols as second-class glyphs? Are you frustrated that -> looks nothing like an arrow, and $, @, % seem ever mismatched?
Want to experience the beauty of ligatures without losing the simplicity of ASCII and getting tangled in the web of ligature-compatible terminal emulators?
Myna 🐦⬛ (Gracula religiosa) is a monospace font which aims to bring harmony to your editor by treating symbols as first-class glyphs alongside alphanumeric characters.
NB: Please don't mind the colorscheme in the banner above. I just picked it because it highlighted the most colors in Ray.so. Since the banner contains multiple languages, no single colorscheme could properly highlight them in one image.
Myna was born of a need to scratch a persistent typographical itch. While I've tried many otherwise well-crafted monospace fonts, I always found myself wanting to tweak a glyph here or adjust a shape there. After developing Myna and using it almost exclusively in my professional and personal work, I'm sharing it as a small contribution to the wonderful community of monospace typography enthusiasts.
Here are a few of its attractive features that might make it your next favourite monospace font:
- Symbol-First Design: clear emphasis on ASCII symbols which are ubiquitous in programming languages
- Near-Perfect Alignment: multi-character symbols like
->,>>=,=~,::align seamlessly - Balanced Weight: symbols have just the right visual weight against your code
- Minimalist Forms: geometric shapes for quotes and commas
- Language-Aware Design: clean sigils for Perl + elegant operators for Haskell + clear symbols for Rust (and even APL)
- Clear Distinction: no more confusing
1 l I |or0 O o
Below is a comparison of Myna (colored line at bottom) with other popular monospace fonts (the actual list can be found in the script drawcomp). It highlights Myna's philosophy of uniform and aligned glyph design so that symbols look natural and editing remains fun.
Myna features Regular, Medium, Bold weight with faux Italic variants for all of them. In order to download them, please download the released zip files or clone the repo and then copy the relevant fonts from the folder fonts/ into the font directory in your OS.
git clone https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna.git
cd ./Myna/fonts
cp *.otf ~/.local/share/fonts/
fc-cache -vgit clone https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna.git
cd Myna
cp Myna.otf ~/Library/Fonts/- Download the release
- Right-click
Myna.otfand select "Install for all users"
NB: I've added a one-liner script mknerdfont to attach NerdFont glyphs into any variant. I've also released the Regular variant with NerdFont. You can use to script to run on any variant/weight to get a NerdFont-compatible version. You'd need fontpatcher installed for mknerdfont to work.
NB: I've also added a script changeheight.py to increase/decrease vertical spacing (in response to #9). You can use it if you want more vertical compactness in your terminal.
NB: The latest release (v2.0.0) features contextual variants for a few glyph pairs (eg, |>, :=) in response to #1 and #6. You'd need a terminal which can work with font features to be able to display them.
SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1
Myna started out as Hera which was a customised version of Source Code Pro but now has come a long way after stealing many beautiful designs from Fira Mono, Inconsolata, Plex Mono, Office Code Pro, Anonymous Pro. Detailed credits could be found in the Hera repository.
Code banner and illustrations were produced using ImageMagick and Ray.so.
Myna is designed to be used universally in every kind of terminal and editor. I've tried to include a reasonable subset of non-ASCII glyphs (mostly geometrical and mathematical characters). However, I'm considering expanding it based on community interest and would welcome contributions in these areas:
- Bug Reports: spacing and kerning issues, rendering problems, unavailable/incorrect glyphs
- Feature Requests: suggest new glyphs or features via GitHub Issues
Please feel free to open issues and also contact me at irfan@irfanali.org.